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26 Jul 2012

Well this headline will probably not be shocking to many in Banana Republic: Murder No. 6.

And these sorts of descriptions are rather common now:

“A man armed with a gun walked up to Ogiste and without warning, opened fire, shooting him multiple times about his head and upper body. Ogiste fell to the ground between his truck and another vehicle. He died on the spot. The killer tucked the gun in the waist area of his pants and then calmly walked away while all around him persons scampered in fear and screams filled the air. This was the sixth murder to occur in Carapo in three incidents over the space of less than two months.”

OR

“On June 18, at about 2 am, two men broke into the Pascal Lane, Carapo home of sisters Gwendolyn Kim Griffith, 35, and Salisha Sue Griffith, 28. The women were tied up, raped and then chopped, stabbed and their throats slashed. As they lay bleeding inside their wooden house, their killers doused the structure with gasolene and set it on fire. The charred remains were later found by firemen and police officers after the fire was extinguished.”

The ‘authorities’ on Banana Republic have been facing a crime situation that took off somewhere in 1999. You don’t need to be a criminologist to know that. Successive governments have claimed they have tried various strategies. The only one that arrested the ‘murder rate’ was actually the recent State of Emergency – but that was not for long enough to definitively reverse the trend of homicides. We must keep in mind that the Nation in question had been relatively awash with energy resources and petroleum money for 50 years compared to the likes of neighbouring Barbados or Grenada. With all that resources and money they could not control what was coming at them?! It’s not a lack of money, that beleaguers that Nation – it is the lack of appropriate application of any collective intelligence they could find.

I conclude that the Republic of Trinidad & Tobago is approaching the status of a ‘failed State’. Their floundering solution, I predict, will be to re-instate the State of Emergency. But that’s no real solution - it is merely a stop-gap measure. Remember my words: ‘Build that raft – run, swim, fly – do whatever is necessary and within law to survive.’